ICTJ: Debate Continues: Is Remembrance about Rights or Ideology?

Our online debate is heating up with Pablo de Greiff and David Rieff’s rebuttals. We want to thank Sihem Bensedrine, President of Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission, and all of those who already shared their valuable opinions in the comments section. We are looking forward to reading contributions from all of you. Your participation is key to this conversation.

We invite you to read Pablo and David’s responses to each other’s opening arguments. I am sure it will be hard not to jump in after you read their articles – and we hope you do!

Here is a taste of their rebuttal essays:

The Duty to Remember

“A blog is not the best place to lay the argument in favor of a duty. But let me try. Recalling that what is at stake here is not memory but the public acknowledgment of great violations of rights, a refusal to acknowledge them, to give them a place in our public space, involves a value judgment that there is no way to spin without demeaning the value of the victims or the importance of rights — not just their rights but rights in general for the value of the notion that these days rests to a large extent on their generalizability.

Aside from what it says about those who persist in the refusal to acknowledge the pain of others when the subject is the greatest atrocities known to human beings, at the limit, persisting in the refusal to acknowledge great harms in itself generates new harms. Recall, again, that the forms of remembrance at stake in this discussion are not private recollections but public manifestations of recognition.

To the extent that we expect others to be part of a shared political community, we owe them sufficient recognition for them to take the project to be truly shared. This is very clear in the case of our fellow citizens. “Fellow citizens,” however, does not refer to our compatriots only or those with whom we share a nationality. We are today fellow citizens of a community of rights. To the extent that we expect others to trust us in that capacity, we have the duty to remember everything that we cannot reasonably expect our fellow citizens to forget.”

Collective Remembrance is Ideological, Not Impartial

“Our disagreement largely centers on what happens later on, when those who have suffered the injury and, for that matter, their children and grandchildren, are no longer alive. Because while de Greiff is unquestionably right that for a victim of the military dictatorship in Argentina or the Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia, forgetting is not an option, those memories are as mortal as the people who retain them. To make an obvious point, there is in fact no such thing as collective memory but only individual memory.

Instead, what we are talking about when we invoke collective memory is the consensus about the past that societies develop and that evolve over time. It is that form of collective memory that I am so skeptical of, because, again, of my sense that it can be such a dangerous goad to resentment, hate, and war. From what de Greiff writes in his first contribution, I did not have the impression that he would necessarily disagree.

One final point, both de Greiff and Bensedrine appeal almost exclusively to the language of rights as if rights could be distanced from politics. As someone who believes that law is a fundamentally political artifact, I do not think this is possible. I would simply point out that, uncomfortable as many (though certainly not all) of its advocates are to admit this, human rights is an ideology just as surely as communism was or neoliberalism is today. Can a fundamentally ideological construct lay serious claim to being impartial? Perhaps it can, but I have to say I think it highly unlikely.”

Sincerely,

Marcie Mersky
ICTJ Director of Programs